Professor Paul Hallwood’s book Economics of the Oceans: Rights, Rents and Resources (Routledge, Oxford, 2014) has been translated into Korean.
Faculty publication
Professor Ray publishes in Empirical Economics
Professor Subhash Ray published his recent paper “Unrestricted geometric distance functions and the Geometric Young productivity index: an analysis of Indian manufacturing” coauthored with Arnab Deb (Associate Professor, International Management Institute New Delhi) and Kankana Mukherjee (Associate Professor, Babson College) in Empirical Economics.
At this point, the paper is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-020-01925-0.
Both of his coauthors are his former PhD students: Arnab Deb (PhD UConn 2012) and Kankana Mukherjee (PhD UConn 1997).
Professors Harmon and Tomolonis Publish in Journal of Economic Education
Oskar Harmon and Paul Tomolonis (UConn PhD 2017) have co-authored the article “Learning Tableau – A data visualization tool”, published in the Journal of Economic Education.
ABSTRACT: “Doing economics” is an important theme of undergraduate economics programs. Capstone courses increasingly include instruction in “data literacy” and the STEM-related skills of quantitative and empirical methods. Because the professional discipline has moved in this direction and because of greater employer demand for these skills, data visualization is a key component of data literacy. Tableau is a free data visualization software widely used in the data analytics industry. In this article, the authors introduce an exercise that teaches the fundamental Tableau concepts and commands needed to create charts, assemble them in a dashboard, and tell a story of patterns observed in the data. The exercise assumes no prior experience in Tableau and is appropriate for undergraduate upper-level economics courses or an empirical methods course.
The article is available at the JEE website
NBER Releases Research on COVID-19 Impacts on Minority Unemployment Co-authored by UConn Economics Faculty
A working paper has been released by the National Bureau of Economic Research that examines the impact of COVID-19 on minority unemployment through the most recent release of Current Population Survey (CPS) data for April of 2020.
The research finds that unemployment of blacks (at 16.6 percent) has not been impacted as severely as during past downturns although their unemployment rate is above the national average of 14.7 percent. In comparison, Latinx unemployment (at 18.2 percent) has been much more impacted than in recent months or the Great Recession. Historically, unemployment of blacks would be greater than that of Latinx throughout the business cycle. In the April CPS data, for the first time, unemployment of Latinx is higher. The analysis reveals that the disproportionate impact among the Latinx is related to lower levels of education, less work experience, and a concentration of employment in industries and occupations that left them more vulnerable to job loss.
The research is co-authored by Robert Fairlie of the University of California Santa Cruz, UConn Faculty member Ken Couch, and Huanan Xu of Indiana University South Bend. Xu is an alumni of the UConn Ph.D. program in economics.
The working paper can be found at this link:
Professor Agüero Published in AER Papers and Proceedings
Professor Jorge Agüero’s article “Is Community-Based Targeting Effective in Identifying Intimate Partner Violence?” has been published in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings:
Is Community-Based Targeting Effective in Identifying Intimate Partner Violence?
Jorge M. Agüero, Úrsula Aldana, Erica Field, Veronica Frisancho and Javier Romero
We measure the effectiveness of community-based targeting to identify victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) in rural Peru. In 254 villages, we collected self-reported data on IPV via a DHS-style questionnaire and compared it to a listing of women elicited from female community leaders. The results indicate that IPV is widely underreported by leaders: on average, leaders report an IPV rate of 17.9 percent, and when asked to name individuals, report only 7.7 percent of women. Both numbers are well below the 38.3 percent measured through self-reports. Overall, the evidence does not support community-based instruments for identifying IPV victims or rates.
Professor Shor’s Article a Finalist for the 2019 Decision Analysis Special Recognition Award
Professor Shor’s article, Optimizing Choice Architectures, was one of three finalists for the 2019 Decision Analysis Special Recognition Award, awarded annually to the best paper published in the journal, Decision Analysis, in the previous year.
The paper (coauthored with Tibor Besedes, Sudipta Sarangi, Cary Deck, and former UConn PhD student Mark Schneider) examines numerous ways to improve decision making from a large set of options. Different methods work for different people, and the paper identifies the source of this heterogeneity.
Professor Harmon’s SSRN Working Paper on Data Visualization is Top 5 Downloaded Paper
The Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a platform for dissemination of early-stage research, recently announced their all-time top ten downloaded papers in the topic Data Visualization. Oskar Harmon’s paper “Learning Tableau: A Data Visualization Tool” with Steven Batt, and Paul Tomolonis was among that list.
“Doing economics” and “data literacy” are becoming important themes of undergraduate economics programs. This paper introduces an exercise that teaches the fundamental Tableau concepts and commands needed to create charts, assemble them in a dashboard, and tell a story of patterns observed in the data. The exercise assumes no prior experience in Tableau and is appropriate for an undergraduate economics capstone course or an empirical methods course.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/topten/topTenResults.cfm?groupingId=3506979&netorjrnl=jrnl
Professor Ross’s HCEO Working Paper on Friendship Effects is Top 5 Downloaded Paper
The Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO) at the University of Chicago announced their top five downloaded working papers of 2019.
Steve Ross’s paper “The Consequences of Friendships: Evidence on the Effect of Social Relationships in School on Academic Achievement” with Jason Fletcher and Yuxiu Zhang was among that list.
In that paper, they show that female students experience substantial improvements in their academic performance when they have more friends from an advantaged economic background, i.e. friends whose mothers completed four years of college. These effects may arise in part because girls with such friendships are also better integrated into their school environment.
Professor Miceli Publishes The Paradox of Punishment
Professor Thomas Miceli has published The Paradox of Punishment: Reflections on the Economics of Criminal Justice.
From the publisher:
This book explores the insights that can be gained by looking at the criminal justice system from an economic point of view. It provides an economic analysis of the institutional structure and function of the criminal justice system, how its policies are formulated, and how they affect behavior.
Yet it goes beyond an examination of specific policies to address the broad question of how law influences behavior. For example, it examines how concepts such as the possibility of redemption affect the decisions of repeat offenders, and whether individual responsibility is (or should be) a pre-requisite for punishment. Finally, the book argues that, in addition to the threat of criminal sanctions, law inculcates principles of acceptable behavior among citizens by asserting that certain acts are “against the law.” This “expressive function” of law can influence behavior to the extent that at least some people in society are receptive to such a message. For these people, the moral content of law has more than mere symbolic value, and consequently, it can expand the scope of traditional law enforcement while lowering its cost.
Another goal of the book is therefore to use economic theory to assess this dualistic function of law by specifically recognizing how its policies can both internalize an ethic of obedience to the law among some people irrespective of its consequences, while simultaneously threatening to punish those who only respond to external incentives.
https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030316945#aboutBook
Professor Prakash publishes in Feminist Economics
Nishith Prakash and co-author Krishna Chaitanya Vadlamannati are publishing their article “Girls for Sale? Child Sex Ratio and Girl Trafficking in India” in Feminist Economics, the journal of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE)
From the abstract:
Illegal trafficking of girls results from their disadvantageous position in society, often reflected by preference for sons and neglect of daughters. India has both higher levels of illegal trafficking of girls and abnormal child sex ratios in favor of boys. This paper examines if the skewed sex ratio in India is associated with trafficking of girls. Using panel data from twenty-nine Indian states from 1980 to 2011, the study finds that a 100-unit increase in the child sex ratio is associated with a 0.635 percent increase in girl trafficking. Further, the association is heterogeneous by women’s empowerment, crime against women, and party rule in the state, and the association between the child sex ratio and trafficking of girls is stronger and larger in magnitude in states with greater women’s empowerment. Overall, it appears the results are driven both by greater reporting and a greater incidence of illegal girl trafficking.